Location Choices Of Real Estate Companies In Organizational Growth Process

Multi-location firms promote the flow of knowledge,information,and communications between locations,contribute to the regional employment and economic development,and thus are regarded as an important part in society and economy.For multi-location firms,their growth and development are generally reflected in the expansion of geographical space,during which location choices are key activities.However,it is common that firms choose improper location choices in the process of spatial expansion of multi-location firms.Location choice in organizational growth process has been the focus of scholars in multiple disciplines,such as strategic management,international business,and economic geography.The existing literature mainly studies the driving factors of firms' location choices from the aspects of external environment of locations and previous location experiences of firms.Some scholars have pointed out that the network feature between location units are important attributes of multi-location firms.However,the existing literature mainly uses a ‘single-point' perspective towards multi-location firms,and considers location choices of firms as discontinuous and independent activities.This perspective ignores the important influence of the relationships between firms' previous location decisions on subsequent location choice,and some scholars have suggested the growing importance of firm evolution research based on microfoundations.Strategic momentum research in strategy and organizational field pays attention to the interdependence between organizational activities and their interactions within the system,and has attracted widespread interests from scholars at home and abroad.However,some scholars have pointed out that the existing strategic momentum research has the problem of oversimplifying activities and neglects the various characteristics of the activities per se,which requires further exploration and test of the mechanisms of strategic momentum.From strategic momentum perspective,this dissertation takes Chinese real estate companies listed on the Shanghai,Shenzhen and Hong Kong Stock Exchanges as the sample,and tries to answer the research question of ‘how the previous location choices of a firm affect its growth trajectory' in order to contribute to existing location choice and strategic momentum research.Specifically,Study 1(Chapter 4)focuses on how the spatial structure of a firm's previous location decisions affects its subsequent location choice.A firm's previous location experiences are divided into the locational experience and the spatial experience,and the effects of repetitive momentum and positional momentum as well as two mechanisms of positional momentum are verified by empirical research.Study 2(Chapter 5)focuses on how the accumulated experiences of a firm's previous location decisions affect its subsequent location choice.Based on the expansions within or across regions,firms' location decisions are divided into two types: exploitation-and exploration-oriented location choices.The momentum effects within and between types are empirically examined,and the complementarity among firm activities is verified as an important mechanism of contextual momentum above.This dissertation mainly draws the following research conclusions:First,the relationships between location units are important factors influencing location choices of firms.And firms tend to choose the location that is overall closer to the existing location markets.Location choices of firms are not independent decisions,but represent the evolution of the spatial structure of the firms' location units.Second,established routines and affordance are important mechanisms that prompt firms to choose locations overall closer to the existing location markets.Firms' experiencing CEO turnover in the previous year and locations' higher institutional quality will weaken the above effects from spatial structure of firms' location choices.Third,firms' location experiences are reflected in the dynamic adjustment of firms' state through the process of exploitation and exploration.Prior location experiences will weaken the propensity of location choices of the same type,and strengthen the propensity of location choices of the other type in the next period.Fourth,complementarity is an important mechanism that prompts firms to implement different types of location choices to achieve dynamic balance between exploitation and exploration.And organizational slack will strengthen the effects of prior location experiences on subsequent exploration-oriented location choices.This dissertation makes four main contributions to the literature:First,based on the network and system features of multi-location firms,this dissertation introduces the strategic momentum perspective into the field of location choice research,and provides a new theoretical perspective towards motivation and antecedents for the location choices of firms.Second,besides the temporal correlation of behavioral events that previous strategic momentum research focuses on,this dissertation further studies the structural correlation formed by these events in spatial dimension,and clarifies the inconsistent view on the acceleration or deceleration effects of momentum in strategic momentum research.Third,this dissertation adopts the process perspective to reveal the importance of resource synergy in the balance between firms' continuously exploitation and exploration,and deepens the theoretical understandings of the endogenous organizational growth.Forth,this dissertation verifies the positive correlations between the exploitation and exploration activities revealed in the previous literature in the context of firms' location choices,and enriches the understanding of the dynamic balance between exploitation and exploration of organizational activities.